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Parting Letter

Rev. Carl Burnham, beloved pastor of the Chapel on Fir Hill in Akron, Ohio, wrote in 1962, just prior to his Homegoing,

“When I die, if my family wishes to inscribe anything on my gravestone, I would like it to be the promise of Jesus Christ in Hebrews 13:5, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” For in due season the springtime will arrive...Then, when the resurrection sings itself in the robins glad song, and bursting buds defy the death grip of winter, and you walk upon the yielding earth near my graveremember that my soul is not there, but rather it is absent from the body, present with the Lord. And somewhere, the atoms that make up my brain, my heartmy bodywill be sending out resurrection radiations of a frequency too high for any earthly Geiger counter to record. But if you place the meter of Gods Word alongside that cemetery plot and adjust the settings to Hebrews 13:5, you will receive this reading: “He hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.”